this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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What is renters coop? Also, renting from the government sounds worse than renting from a landlord unless you're getting a steep discount.
A renters cooperative. The renters own all the buildings, the rent strictly goes towards the maintenance and admin costs. Also called "Baugenossenschaft" in Germany if you want to know about real-life examples. Their remnants of pre-ww1 marxist policies. The deposit becomes kind of a buy-in that appreciates in value and when leaving the coop the renter gets their buy-in back. It is usually considered a pretty good investment.
As for renting from the government, this is typically pretty cheap. The soviets for example paid around 5-7% of their income for rent.
from https://doi.org/10.2307/3001359 p178
Relative Weight of Rent in Budgets of Workers and Employees in the USSR.
What's more having the rent set by the government allows for rent decreases for certain groups of people based on their legal status e. g. (same paper p176-177)
I don't understand the difference between a renters coop and a regular apartment.
Fair enough. For five percent, I'll haggle with all the bureaucracy necessary.
A regular apartment the owner gets the rent and then decides how to spend it (maybe on the apartment, maybe the mortgage of the building, maybe on a new sports car for themselves). In a renters coop the tenants pay "themselves" and they decide how to use the money. How much should they allocate for gardening, repairpeople, new buildings etc. It gets cheaper and cheaper at scale too. There usually is some democratic decision making-process involved where the tenants decide.
Who owns the units?